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Health Data Breaches Account for 21% of Total Incidents

Health data breaches continued to account for the most amount of data breaches for the first half of 2015, according to Gemalto’s Breach Level Index.

Specifically, health data breaches accounted for 21.1 percent of the total number of incidents, and a total of 187 breaches. The financial services industry had the next highest number of breaches with 143, accounting for 16.1 percent of the total. Government was the third highest sector, accounting for 15.8 percent of breaches with 140 incidents total.

“What we’re continuing to see is a large ROI for hackers with sophisticated attacks that expose massive amounts of data records,” Gemalto VP and Chief Technology Officer Jason Hart said in a statement. “Cyber criminals are still getting away with big and very valuable data sets. For instance, the average healthcare data breach in the first half of 2015 netted more than 450,000 data records, which is an increase of 200 percent compared to the same time last year.”